May 24, 2013

Natasha Trethewey: A Poet of Our Time [by Sharon Preiss]

Natasha Trethewey is the perfect poet for the 21st
Century Obama-era United States. Her work embodies much that is current and
important in today’s America as the country is being forced in so many ways to
move out of its selfish childhood and into a more mature adult place in the
world. To claim she is the most contemporary of poets may be a bit odd to say
of someone whose poetry is so much steeped in the historical past. But as she
examines history via her precise poetic dissections of paintings, photos and
texts, and works to untangle her own story of her American heritage, she lays
bare our country’s complex and often troublesome saga of race relations, white superiority,
and hubris with all its lingering prejudices and bias.

In 2007, Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry
for her Native Guard, a series of
poems that swings between the Civil War-, Ante-bellum-, and 20th
Century-era South. Tretheway’s own parents (he white, she black) met in the early
1960s at Frankfort State College in Kentucky, and, as Trethewey writes in
“Miscegention,”

In 1965 my
parents broke two laws of Mississippi;

they went
to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They
crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name

begins with
a sound like sin, the sound of wrong
– mis in Mississippi.

Two poems later, in “Southern History,” she weaves herself
into the story:

Before the war, they were happy, he
said,

quoting our
textbook. (This was senior-year

history
class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,

and better off under a master’s care.

I watched the words blur on the
page. No one

raised a
hand, disagreed. Not even me.

This would have been about 1984. It’s shocking that even
then, the real story’s not being told.

Trethewey’s most recent book of poems, Thrall, published in 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, traces the
origins of the story back even further. At a recent reading at New York City’s
Cosmopolitan Club, co-hosted by the University of Georgia, of which Trethewey
is an alumna, she read exclusively from this book and talked a bit about her
work.

Thrall is an
amazing book, the language leading the reader so gently into the brutal world
of colonial dominion that we are smack in the middle of it, forced to look into
the mirror of history before we can pull the cloak of denial over our eyes.
Even the word “Thrall,” so close to “thrill” or “trill” and moving from the
whispering “th” through its cascading “all,” does not imply the imprisonment of
slave or captive that it actually denotes.

In the four-part poem “Taxonomy,” the poet describes a
series of 18th Century portraits that could, at quick
glance, look
like simple familial paintings or ones of a master and his slaves. But these
are casta paintings, and they were
created to codify the equations of mixed race families. Trethewey deftly incorporates
lilting phrases like “crown of lace,” “soft curl of her hair,” and “An infant,
she is borne” to show how the delicacy of the painting can obscure its more
sinister implications. But by the closing lines of the first poem in the series
we are shown a closeup of the servant who carries the mestizo child:

… He is
dark

as
history, origin of the word

native: the weight of blood,

a
pale mistress on his back.

heavier
every year.

Trethewey’s way of unveiling injustices and illuminating
wrong-thinking echoes Percy Bysshe Selley’s, “Poetry is a mirror which makes
beautiful that which is distorted.” And yet the distorted must still be
righted. In the poem with which she closed her reading, “Enlightenment,” the
poet and her father revisit Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello after it’s
been scientifically determined that Sally Hemings’s ancestors are part of
Jefferson’s own lineage. Trethewey recounts how, on their first visit, her
father defended Jefferson’s actions:

how
Jefferson hated slavery, though – out

of necessity, my
father said – had to own

slaves;
that his moral philosophy meant

he could
not have fathered those children:

would have been impossible, my father
said.

In the present visit, they both now know the real story, and
their love for each other has endured despite her having to find her own way
past the “knowledge” he’d previously passed on. This “knowledge,” the poet implies, is what we
must always be questioning and fighting against, these seemingly fixed barriers
that keep us “other to each other,” as Trethewey phrases it in the last line of
the poem. And as the book’s epigraphs so aptly put it:

Comments

Natasha Trethewey: A Poet of Our Time [by Sharon Preiss]

Natasha Trethewey is the perfect poet for the 21st
Century Obama-era United States. Her work embodies much that is current and
important in today’s America as the country is being forced in so many ways to
move out of its selfish childhood and into a more mature adult place in the
world. To claim she is the most contemporary of poets may be a bit odd to say
of someone whose poetry is so much steeped in the historical past. But as she
examines history via her precise poetic dissections of paintings, photos and
texts, and works to untangle her own story of her American heritage, she lays
bare our country’s complex and often troublesome saga of race relations, white superiority,
and hubris with all its lingering prejudices and bias.

In 2007, Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry
for her Native Guard, a series of
poems that swings between the Civil War-, Ante-bellum-, and 20th
Century-era South. Tretheway’s own parents (he white, she black) met in the early
1960s at Frankfort State College in Kentucky, and, as Trethewey writes in
“Miscegention,”

In 1965 my
parents broke two laws of Mississippi;

they went
to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They
crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name

begins with
a sound like sin, the sound of wrong
– mis in Mississippi.

Two poems later, in “Southern History,” she weaves herself
into the story:

Before the war, they were happy, he
said,

quoting our
textbook. (This was senior-year

history
class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,

and better off under a master’s care.

I watched the words blur on the
page. No one

raised a
hand, disagreed. Not even me.

This would have been about 1984. It’s shocking that even
then, the real story’s not being told.

Trethewey’s most recent book of poems, Thrall, published in 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, traces the
origins of the story back even further. At a recent reading at New York City’s
Cosmopolitan Club, co-hosted by the University of Georgia, of which Trethewey
is an alumna, she read exclusively from this book and talked a bit about her
work.

Thrall is an
amazing book, the language leading the reader so gently into the brutal world
of colonial dominion that we are smack in the middle of it, forced to look into
the mirror of history before we can pull the cloak of denial over our eyes.
Even the word “Thrall,” so close to “thrill” or “trill” and moving from the
whispering “th” through its cascading “all,” does not imply the imprisonment of
slave or captive that it actually denotes.

In the four-part poem “Taxonomy,” the poet describes a
series of 18th Century portraits that could, at quick
glance, look
like simple familial paintings or ones of a master and his slaves. But these
are casta paintings, and they were
created to codify the equations of mixed race families. Trethewey deftly incorporates
lilting phrases like “crown of lace,” “soft curl of her hair,” and “An infant,
she is borne” to show how the delicacy of the painting can obscure its more
sinister implications. But by the closing lines of the first poem in the series
we are shown a closeup of the servant who carries the mestizo child:

… He is
dark

as
history, origin of the word

native: the weight of blood,

a
pale mistress on his back.

heavier
every year.

Trethewey’s way of unveiling injustices and illuminating
wrong-thinking echoes Percy Bysshe Selley’s, “Poetry is a mirror which makes
beautiful that which is distorted.” And yet the distorted must still be
righted. In the poem with which she closed her reading, “Enlightenment,” the
poet and her father revisit Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello after it’s
been scientifically determined that Sally Hemings’s ancestors are part of
Jefferson’s own lineage. Trethewey recounts how, on their first visit, her
father defended Jefferson’s actions:

how
Jefferson hated slavery, though – out

of necessity, my
father said – had to own

slaves;
that his moral philosophy meant

he could
not have fathered those children:

would have been impossible, my father
said.

In the present visit, they both now know the real story, and
their love for each other has endured despite her having to find her own way
past the “knowledge” he’d previously passed on. This “knowledge,” the poet implies, is what we
must always be questioning and fighting against, these seemingly fixed barriers
that keep us “other to each other,” as Trethewey phrases it in the last line of
the poem. And as the book’s epigraphs so aptly put it: